Hear this, helicopters!

I heard a snippet of an interview this morning on WAMC. Joe Donahue was interviewing Michael Thompson about his latest book, Homesick and Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grow which was published about a year ago. The author is appearing Wednesday, May 15th in Lenox, MA and he’ll be talking about his research into summer camps and their impact upon the growth of independence in children.

One of the assertions he made on the radio this morning intrigued me. Apparently college educated women today spend more than twice as much time with their children than their own moms did in the 1960s. I tracked down some data which supported that statement and immediately exhaled a sigh of relief. Maybe I wasn’t short-changing my children in quality time each time I took run or met a friend for a beer!

The other statement which I found consoling was with regards to the current tendency of parents to feel obligated to attend each and every game their child(ren) play. I don’t know how you manage it, but the simultaneous seasons of lacrosse and soccer are kicking my butt! Maybe witnessing every goal your child makes isn’t necessarily a direct ticket to Mommy of the Year.

Perhaps allowing our kids the space to learn and grow beyond our intense gaze may be beneficial – for us, as parents, and them.

Seeing as how one of the primary goals of parenting is to create independent humans with their own interests and personalities, it only seems logical that we need to learn how to let our children go. Summer camp seems an ideal place to explore this important milestone of maturity, but there are numerous ways to encourage our children to have new experiences. Trust me on this. In the last 6 weeks I’ve cut my 16 year-old loose in Amsterdam (Holland, that is) for a couple of hours solo and allowed him to travel to NYC on his own to check out an exhibit in Grand Central Station that he’d been talking about for months.

On both occasions, he came back to me beaming – proud of his accomplishments and filled with new knowledge, knowledge about a subject he finds personally compelling, and himself and his own capabilities. All without a hover.